I've always wondered this – why can't you declare variables after a case label in a switch statement? In C++ you can declare variables pretty much anywhere (and declaring them close to first use is obviously a good thing) but the following still won't work:
switch (val)
{
case VAL:
// This won't work
int newVal = 42;
break;
case ANOTHER_VAL:
...
break;
}
The above gives me the following error (MSC):
initialization of 'newVal' is skipped by 'case' label
This seems to be a limitation in other languages too. Why is this such a problem?
Best Answer
Case
statements are only labels. This means the compiler will interpret this as a jump directly to the label. In C++, the problem here is one of scope. Your curly brackets define the scope as everything inside theswitch
statement. This means that you are left with a scope where a jump will be performed further into the code skipping the initialization.The correct way to handle this is to define a scope specific to that
case
statement and define your variable within it: